Re: st: The philosophy behind storing missing values as very large positive numbers

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 03:21 AM 7/3/2004 -0400, jockmcdock@netscape.net wrote:
> One thing in Stata that irks me is the treatment of missing values. Stata 
> (IMO) does not handle missings consistenly. For example, if I issue a 
> regression command, missings are recognised as missings and these values 
> are not included in the regression. However, if I type
>
> gen x=1 if (y>10)
>
> then x has the value 1 even if y is missing. In other words, Stata treats 
> as a real value. It's a problem that's easy to solve, but if you forget to 
> include "& y!=.", you can create problems further down the line. Other 
> statistical packages get this right.
There was a discussion of this in a lengthy thread last January that starts at

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2004-01/msg00121.html

My own "If I ruled the world" preference is given at

http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2004-01/msg00136.html

But, since I don't rule the world, I've learned to try to live with Stata's 
way of doing things.

-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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